The Met’s rear halls were not at all glamorous. One hallowed corridor leading beyond the gate—and the gate itself was chipped and scratched—was lined with black metal lockers. Another passage was almost barricaded off by a pile of decrepit cardboard boxes, the bottom box crumpling under the weight of whatever long-disused props or paraphernalia the others held. Detritus cropped up constantly along routes blearily lit by fluorescent bulbs. A theme of disregard ran throughout the sections of the building that only insiders ever saw, making the point that to perform in this house, or to be in any way involved in the splendid offerings that blossomed on the front side of the stage, was to have no need of any other affirmation. To walk here, to work here, to sing here was to be at one of the world’s pinnacles in the most exacting of art forms.
To reach the rehearsal room for their meeting on the morning after the semis, the finalists squeezed past the costume department. A cavern of designers and seamsters stooped over tables and created the royal garments of kingdoms spanning from sixteenth-century Spain to ancient China. The tables were strewn with gauze and beads. Lamé shimmered. Metal clothing racks lined the hall. The racks were jammed, the garments crushed together. Elaborate collars and velvet trains were smashed. Here was more of the Met’s excess, more of its indifference. Satin bodices gathered dust.
The cinder block room where the singers assembled was spare and windowless. Large mirrors were framed haphazardly in unfinished plywood. A leak from the ceiling was channeled into a strip of tubing and dripped into an old watercooler keg. Gayletha Nichols sat at a fold-out table beside Camille LaBarre, a Met patron and the chief fund-raiser for the competition. They congratulated everyone, went over the week’s schedule in detail, and asked if anyone had any questions before the preparations for the finals began.
“Yes,” Ryan said. “Where can I do my laundry?” He hadn’t packed for a stay lasting past the semis. He smiled at Nichols and LaBarre, but the price of the hotel’s laundry service had been weighing on him since he’d found out yesterday that he would be here for another week.
With the location of a nearby laundromat sorted out, the meeting moved on. Though most of the coming week would be devoted to artistry, to understanding and giving deeper expression to music, for the next couple of hours everyone concentrated on what the contestants would wear. LaBarre reviewed the singers’ tuxedos and gowns. She was in her sixties, with an impeccable haircut and a petite figure and tailored ensembles that emanated a modest flair.
Deanna, the soprano with high-wire vocal agility, modeled a dark dress with restrained adornments. It showed off her slim body in an unshowy way; it left uncovered only a splash of upper chest. She won immediate approval from LaBarre.
Philippe, the bass-baritone who trailed phrases of Sinatra as he traveled through the building, danced while Deanna modeled. With his prow of blond curls and his skinny hips, he executed a sequence of Astaire-like spins, the twirls apropos of nothing going on at the meeting except his own wish to dazzle, a desire so unbridled it was endearing.
“I’m considering a second tuxedo,” he said when LaBarre turned toward him.
She told him there was no need, that his tux was lovely.
“No, no.” He went on dancing. “I’d like to change tuxedos between my first and second arias.”
“Absolutely, Philippe. We don’t want to take any chances. We don’t want anyone to forget you.”
He gave her his teen idol smile; she put her fingers to her temples in mock dismay.
Michelle was next. She was the one other African American who’d been in the semis. The gleaming undulations of her voice had won her a spot in the finals. Her father was a thriving pastor in Houston, and after she’d stumbled onto a telecast of Madama Butterfly as a young girl and sobbed while watching on the living room sofa, her parents had begun subscribing to Houston Grand Opera, a premier regional company. Her teenage years had been saturated in spirituals and arias, and now, at twenty-eight, she was in her last year as a graduate student at the Academy of Vocal Arts.
Her body was the opposite of Deanna’s and far from the birdlike build of the third woman left in the contest. Michelle was all bust and backside, and her dress, scant on top and clinging below, put her on exhibit. LaBarre, rarely flustered, wasn’t sure how to respond. There was no rule against sexiness in opera; in fact, it was increasingly prized. But with every step Michelle took, her hips and butt seemed to announce not only sensuality but blackness, and the element of race stirred a subtle yet palpable uneasiness in the white room.
“Maybe,” LaBarre started, then lost her words before blurting out: “Is there just a bit too much jiggle factor in that outfit?” She hurried to clarify that she didn’t want anyone to be distracted from Michelle’s gorgeous singing.
Michelle listened with composure and soon returned, for another inspection, in a gown with more coverage and floral blooms stitched to the garment’s lower half, obscuring her body below the waist. LaBarre declared that this was much better, and Michelle said she agreed. But she told me afterward, “That was culture clash. In my opinion, the first dress goes very well with my character, the woman in one of my arias. She longs for passion; she longs to be desired. And the first one also suits me. I’m curvy, and I love my curves.” She sounded unsettled, as if something had been stolen.
With the attire of the seven other finalists resolved, LaBarre focused on Ryan. He owned no passable tuxedo, and in any case, having had no expectation of moving on to this round, he hadn’t brought the badly worn, ill-fitting one he did own. LaBarre set about making the problem go away. Not to worry about the money, she told him. That would be all taken care of.
“The only challenge is going to be finding what we need in your size.”
“Sometimes that can really be a challenge,” he replied, happy to be in LaBarre’s hands, and his sonorous laugh mingled with her lighter one.
“Let me go back to my office and make a few phone calls.”
Promptly she had things figured out and escorted him to Brooks Brothers’ main New York store. With Philippe along for the outing, they entered between stone pillars and beneath an American flag. Ryan was surrounded by a display of fancy umbrellas, their wooden handles burnished, and by a sea of dress shirts in powdery shades, and by an area dedicated to people who might be spending some upcoming time on a yacht. There were silver sailing trophies, cobalt-blue luggage trunks, mannequins in white trousers, and pairs of plaid boating sneakers or white bucks arranged at the mannequins’ feet.
Philippe, whose father was a radiologist, wasn’t affected by any of this. As they continued upstairs to the formal wear department, past equestrian sculptures on antique tables, Philippe spilled forth, mostly to LaBarre and me, about his repertoire, about the career he anticipated, about how magical the art form was because you had to control the nuances of the voice less through voluntary physical adjustments than through “the hypothetical, the illusory, the metaphorical, the imaginary.” Within this speech came a prediction, uttered at prestissimo speed, that he would be one of the winners next Sunday. His self-assurance was more befuddling to Ryan each time he heard it, though he didn’t feel it was unjustified. Where did anyone get so much certainty? How did anyone get so far beyond intimidation?
The formal wear floor was designed to resemble a men’s club. A full-size pool table with leather pockets stood beside a bar whose stools were emblazoned with the early nineteenth-century year of Brooks Brothers’ founding, and this way and that were wood-paneled sitting rooms and libraries with leather-bound books. A calfskin-encased grooming kit and white gloves rested next to a silver tray laid out with a selection of polished cuff links. Horse statuettes were everywhere.
“He’s having his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in a competition,” LaBarre informed a salesman, who had approached with the reserve of a head butler.
The salesman stepped away, then produced something appropriate. “This is a hand-tailored tuxedo.”
Ryan entered the
vestibule between the fitting rooms. He reappeared, minutes later, to LaBarre’s effusions and the salesman’s shoulder-smoothings and an elfin tailor’s scrutiny. The salesman raised the question of whether to opt for a cummerbund or a vest, and he enumerated the pros and cons. Ryan slipped into a vest, slid the jacket back on, and stood again in front of the mirror.
What he saw looked extremely good.
All was done, or almost done. The shirt he’d put on, with a size eighteen and a half neck, fit too well—it would be too snug for singing. He should wear a nineteen.
Preferably with a piqué front, LaBarre told the salesman, and he went off to search. But the store had no such size in stock, not in piqué or pleated.
Together, LaBarre promised Ryan, they would find exactly what he needed.
FOUR
I lOOKED DOWN and he was there to my left. ‘Mommy, Mommy,’” Valerie recalled. He took in what was in front of him: his mother with the knife, his father. “Then somebody must have called the authorities, must have been the neighbors from all the noise, and they showed up. They saw me in my uniform. So they asked me what was up, and they took Cecil outside. They gave him a beating. You could hear it. When he came back in, his shirt was torn. He was crying and apologizing.”
And then he was gone, gone with the babysitter, who became his second wife, and with whom he soon had another son. He’d already had a boy with a woman before Valerie, when he was eighteen, a son he didn’t see from when the child was two till a chance encounter when the boy was nine. Counting the stepson who’d been sleeping on the mattress from the trundle bed, Cecil now had five boys.
The Air Force dispatched Valerie back to Korea to finish her tour. She stowed Adrian and Ryan with her mother, who, after Valerie’s father’s death, was living in Florida. The service moved Valerie, next, to a base outside Tampa, but in short order she quit the military in a fury. She wasn’t treated fairly, she felt. When Ryan had an allergic reaction to a vaccine—“I forgot that he couldn’t have any of those shots with eggs in them”—she put in a request to spend extra time watching over him as he recovered. An officer turned her down. “I was done playing their games,” she said.
She found herself working in a pawnshop. It was part of a chain; the hunched buildings with banners reading “Quick Cash Loans” bloomed here and there on weedy lots across Florida. She manned various sections. There was the jewelry that people had left as collateral and never reclaimed. There were the cameras, the televisions, the guitars. There were the lawn mowers that people brought over, telling themselves it wouldn’t be long before they put their lives in order and began cutting the grass and dandelions in their miniature yards again.
“We had a very big gun selection, which was my favorite area to work. Sometimes you had to set up the displays. I didn’t have firearms in my home. But I loved the way those guns felt in my hands. I enjoyed it in the military, and I enjoyed it in that store. I enjoyed the power.”
* * *
She had a new man, someone from the military. Male attention was never an issue for her. With Cecil having scurried away, with Cecil making no appearances and very few phone calls and fewer contributions, Barry took Adrian and Ryan to car shows, to video game shows. He gave Ryan a book about fighter jets, talked with him about F-14 Tomcats and F-15 Eagles. He took in Valerie and the boys to live with him in base housing. He asked her to marry him. “He was really the only father Ryan ever had. And he was nice to me.” She said yes, and she and her sons moved with him when the military stationed him in southeastern Virginia.
But “something happened” during a tour he spent overseas; when he returned, the marriage grew violent. As Valerie spoke, we drove through that region of Virginia, past Yorktown, where the British had surrendered to Washington’s army, past strip malls along a semirural highway, past narrow fields of soy and cotton behind prefabricated houses. She could not reconstruct the shift that she said had occurred in him, could not recollect the first spark. “Something changed when he came back. He was different. Things were different. It got dangerous.” Any explanation remained out of reach of her mind, as though the trauma that followed eradicated the memory of what had led up to it.
As for the violence itself, Valerie’s story was that Barry was the perpetrator, but her sons suggested that the culpability ran both ways. “Their relationship was toxic,” Ryan said. The marriage lasted till he was around nine. “My mom was not a small lady. She was a huge part of the violence at home. She hit him. She hit me. My mom would get physical with me—and when you’re a kid, how do you stop someone?”
Adrian said the same about Valerie’s rage toward Barry and himself, and about his fear of his mother even as he began to pack on muscle, when he was twelve and thirteen. “Her violence wasn’t normal, it was a whole different type of thing.” He described her as something out of a movie where humans could transform into gargantuan, catastrophic beings. “With me, it wasn’t just a mom whupping her child. I’m not going to lie, when I got out of hand I got out of hand. But she was coming in to destroy.”
Valerie worked for a while at a Virginia shipyard, as a dispatcher for a security company that oversaw the docks. Freighters and cranes and stacked containers and mountains of coal loomed high around her, the coal doused relentlessly to keep the dust from blackening the air. She floated from job to job. She peddled insurance—“but Barry sabotaged that career. I started making good money, more than he was in the military. And he didn’t like that. He was always taking the car we had that drove, and leaving me with the piece of junk. It was always breaking down.”
One day a fight erupted just inside their front door. “I know Ryan was there. Adrian wasn’t. Adrian didn’t see it, but Ryan did. Barry punched me square in the face. I had to go to the emergency room. Having come from one failed marriage, I tried to hang in there. I didn’t want to lose another. And I didn’t want to mess up his career.”
* * *
“It was two floors,” Ryan said. “We’d be up in our bedroom, my brother and I. Between our mom and Barry, there couldn’t be a good week without a horrible one coming. We would hear our mom screaming downstairs. They would break stuff. Adrian would hold me. I was always crying. ‘Why are they doing this?’ I was the crybaby. He’d tell me, ‘It’s all right, man.’ Or if I wanted to run down there, he’d tell me not to.”
Adrian was an artist. Valerie had bought him a Godzilla doll during her time in Korea, and in Virginia it became his muse. Its haunches were ponderous with muscle, its lower legs had multiple bulges, its clawed feet were gigantic. Growths that resembled stalagmites rose jaggedly along its tail. In the bedroom he and Ryan shared, he drew the beast more and more precisely. Inspiration and instruction came from one of his favorite TV shows, a program for adults on PBS. It featured a bizarre white man with a floppy Afro the size of a small shrub. Wearing a powder-blue dress shirt unbuttoned to his chest, the man stood in front of an easel.
He held a circular palette of colors in one lightly freckled hand and a brush in the slender fingers of the other, and he taught his viewers how to paint. “Right up here we’ll make a happy little cloud,” he said, and demonstrated. “Let’s use the fan brush. Look at all the paint in those bristles.” His voice was soothing, and the quantity, the generosity, of the oil paint on his brush was like a balm. He proceeded to teach the painting of evergreen trees. “Leave some limbs out there,” he said, to be sure his pupils didn’t clump the boughs too tightly. “You need places for the little birds to sit.”
Adrian didn’t have a canvas or paint, only paper and colored pencils, and he wasn’t portraying anything like the painter’s trees and clouds, but show by show he gleaned techniques and soaked up confidence from the man’s assumption that anyone could do this. “There we go,” the teacher kept repeating in his soft way, and Adrian captured the scales, rough as barnacles, that covered much of Godzilla’s body. He added the shingle-like layers of hide that protected parts of the monster, and built up the stalagmites into a
profusion of irregular spikes that ran from its upper tail to its lower neck. Godzilla’s jaw was open, and each tooth had its own individualized menace.
Then, as the voices and violence downstairs crested and fell away, and seemed to have subsided safely before they swelled again, and as Ryan watched his brother work with awe, Adrian shifted his focus from Godzilla to dinosaurs. While his mother and stepfather shrieked and bellowed and tore at each other, he followed Godzilla down a path into the Triassic and Jurassic periods, and from there he discovered Dinotopia. Ryan followed his brother.
Dinotopia was an island beyond school maps and surrounded by dangerous reefs, where all the inhabitants—the shipwrecked humans who’d been rescued and carried there by dolphins, and the dinosaurs who’d been there for millions of years, protected from the disasters that brought their extinction elsewhere—lived in serenity. Human families played at the feet of the massive, unflappable beasts. Children rode on endlessly long, swaying dinosaur necks. Adrian sketched and shaded and erased and redrew, trying to bring out every detail of the creatures, down to their beady, affectionate eyes, and Ryan gazed, enveloped.
The dinosaurs had an alphabet, intricate scratches they made with their feet. They had a language with words like “cumspiritik,” which could mean “breathing together” or “close friendship” or “marriage.” A set of legal principles, the Code of Dinotopia, ensured order and tranquility. The source for all of this was the series of illustrated Dinotopia books that Adrian pored over, but in Ryan’s eyes his brother’s versions of the illustrations and copies of the alphabet and explanations of Dinotopian law were more magical than the originals. Adrian seemed to invent Dinotopia; drawing by drawing, he conjured the island.
* * *
“He knocked me unconscious,” Valerie said, remembering another incident. “I was glad my boys didn’t have to see that one. Other than the time by the front door when Barry punched me, which Ryan was forced to witness, I never allowed them to see what was going on.”
Sing for Your Life Page 3